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Based on extended research on Chinese medical and epidemiological archival material dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, and on six months of internship in epidemiology in Beijing’s Medical School and in Haidian District’s Centre of Disease Control and Prevention, this thesis explores the conjunction of three major epidemiological crises in modern Chinese history with processes of State formation: the 1911 Manchurian pneumonic plague, the 1952 germ-warfare, and the 2003 SARS outbreak. Analysing the three crises as Events in line with Alain Badiou’s epistemology it seeks to establish how different strategies of governmental fidelity to the imagined cause of each crisis have led to distinct modes of organisation and valorisation of the social: Republican China and its decline to fascism; the clash between professional revolutionaries and technocrats in Maoist China; and the emergence of the “Harmonious Society” of mass exploitation and repression today. This conjunction between State formation and epidemiological Events is explored with the use of Foucault’s genealogical method in a quest for a historical materialist approach that posits at its epicentre processes of class composition, decomposition and recomposition, and their contested enclosure by the governmental apparati of capture. The present thesis thus examines the three major epidemiological crises of modern China as forming grounds for biopolitical strategies that give rise to modes of subjectivation and circuits of debt/guilt within the context of the class struggle. And at the same time, it aims to create a new field of investigation for anthropology: the relation of State and Event, from a viewpoint that contests the accepted relation of event and structure expounded by Marshall Sahlins, proposing as the main object of this investigation the conjunction between necessity and will that can never be reduced either to the naturalism of historical determinism, nor to the culturalism of subjective contingency.

This dissertation examines the ways in which the 'truth' about an outbreak of zoonotic disease stabilises through the labour of sampling animals. While scarcely any case of Ebola had ever been reported in West Africa, the deadliest epidemic to date started in 2013 in the southeastern region of Guinea called 'Forest Guinea'. Since then, ecologists and virologists from Africa, America and Europe have been conducting the largest investigation into what some frame as the origins of Ebola: they are trying to establish a fuller picture of the processes by which the disease is maintained and infects humans in a place that has become known as one of its 'hotspots'. During 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I closely tracked the Guinean staff of one of those foreign projects - local vets who professionally defined their role as préleveurs ('samplers' in English) - while they captured animals, took, and dispatched fluid samples, communicated about the risks of contact with bats, and disclosed the finding of a new species of Ebola virus in bat species. The social sciences have dismantled the idea of singular, hegemonic epidemic origins, and indicated that complex sociospatial conditions allow for epidemics to emerge. This dissertation adopts a different analytical angle and outlines the technological, epistemological, and affective consequences of framing microbiological research as a search for the origin of epidemics. It focuses on the economy of knowledge, epistemological labour, and ethical aspirations of animal préleveurs, whose work is to make a hotspot exist in Forest Guinea. By combining attention to history, the scientific literature and ethnographic fieldwork, I resituate animal sampling within a West African genealogy of asymmetrical extraction and conservation, which crosscuts the colonial sciences, interwar disease ecology, global health, outbreak preparedness, and the newer One Health agenda. At the core of this multifaceted sampling enterprise is an interdependence between anticipatory practices and forms of insecurity - political, economic, environmental. The thesis suggests that insecurity is normalised by hotspot investigations, and that associated social hierarchies, causalities and moralities inflect the local notion of responsibility for the epidemic. Ultimately, insecurity configures the production of evidence about the so-called reservoir of Ebola and leads the hypothesis of a bat origin to gain strength in Guinea. The dissertation chapters foreground the controversies, dissimulation practices, fear, and cynicism that the quest for epidemic origins elicits locally, even as it contributes to imposing a single narrative for disease causality. In so doing, I challenge a social science view that scientific claims become authoritative when the institutions and practices that manufacture them are socially recognised as trustworthy and legitimate, i.e., secure. Instead, insecurity is entangled in the material performances and ethos of préleveurs. Far from only producing scientific evidence for experts, their activity generates clues about Ebola's origins for many people in Guinea and Africa more generally - with significant consequences for research priorities and prevention policies.